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Detail of Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? by Paul GauguinCredit:
Hulton Fine Art Collection/Getty

Gauguin was disappointed on arriving in Tahiti, expecting an untouched, primal paradise. Instead, he found that a hundred years of Western influence had somewhat tarnished his idealised expectation of the island.

Until his thirties he had worked as a broker at the Paris Stock Exchange, having taken up painting simply as a hobby about 10 years earlier. Once in Tahiti, his paintings allowed him to create his fantasised version of the island, and one designed to intrigue Parisians.

“He’s not a seer, he’s a schemer,” Gauguin’s early mentor Pissarro said bitterly, on hearing of the warm response to the Tahitian pictures. He argued that Gauguin hadn’t lost his stockbroker’s instinct or lust for capitalist...